I just uploaded this day's blog from Word (with Kelly's help - thank you) and for some reason, it all came in underlined, so sorry if this is hard to read. We said good-bye to Tokyo today. After breakfast, we boarded the bus and visiting the largest Shinto shrine in Tokyo. Unfortunately it was raining all day today – sometimes harder than others. The shrine is located in a plot of woods in the middle of the city. There were many priests (those who have gone to theological school) here today. Usually there is only one priest or one priest is shared among a few small shrines. The priests do marry and do not give sermons. Their job is to be an intermediary to the people who are offering wishes to the deities of nature and to officiate at various rites of passage and festival days. We then drove out to Mt. Fuji. Before ascending the mountain, we stopped for lunch at a French restaurant – very good, but the best part was that we had chocolate for the first time on this trip! The dessert was a small dark, unsweetened chocolate brownie – yum! The bus was able to make it to the fifth station (out of ten), which is just over 7000 feet, and at the tree line. The rest of the way must be climbed on foot and takes about 4 to 8 hours depending on your pace. The climbing is only during the months of July and August except by special permit at other times. Most people climb at night so as to reach the top of the crater at sunrise. They say that the line of people climbing looks like a row of fireflies from above as everyone wears a headlamp. We walked a short distance up until the gate just so we could say we had been on Mt. Fuji. Because of the rain, we couldn’t see the very top, but the fog lifted slightly to show some of the mountain which looks black up close (basalt) and not the blue you get from a distance. We were given a lucky charm bell and then mailed many of our postcards from there, as they will be hand stamped from Mt. Fuji. When we visited the shrine, I bought an embroidered good luck Mt. Fuji charm. Coming down the mountain, we stopped at the Mt. Fuji visitor center where we watched a short film on the creation of the volcano mountain. We boarded the bus again to go to our next stop, which is the Hakone region. This region is famous for their woodcraft of parquetry and parquetry. Can’t wait to do some shopping tomorrow! Our hotel is in the town of Gora, which is way up in the mountains. It is a Japanese style hotel. When you are wandering around the hotel and in your room, you wear a yukata and slippers – well, you don’t wear the slippers in the room, only in the other parts of the hotel. The yukata is a very casual kimono type robe, which is belted at the waist with a sash (see photo). Our room is huge! There is a wood floor entry where you change out of your street shoes. You then step up onto the next level, which is a large room with a tatami (grass) matted floor. There is a large low tea table in the middle of the room with two chair mats under it. The bathroom is also large – a small toilet room (with a heated seat!), a sink room, and a very large shower room. The whole room is the shower with a drain in the floor and a large high bathtub to the side. There is also an outer sitting room, which is down a step from the main room. There is a small table and two regular chairs, a writing desk and a small refrigerator with windows all along the side. This room is separated from the main room with sliding paper doors. The whole thing is very cool. The Japanese use the tatami mat as a measuring tool. Each mat is 3feet by 6 feet and arranged every which way to cover the floor. So to give you an idea of how big the rooms were even though all of the floors were not covered by mats: the entry is 3 tatimi mats, the main room is 10 mats, the sitting room is 4 mats, the toilet room is 1 mat, the wash room is 1 mat, and the shower room is 3 mats. Just after we settled into our room a young lady dressed in a kimono came and poured us each a cup of green tea. She also presented us each with a pair of parquetry chopsticks as a gift from the hotel management – wow! I had a laugh when Dave went into the bathroom. When you enter the toilet room, you are supposed to put on a different pair of slippers (toilet slippers) just for use in that room. Well, he could only fit them over his toes and he looked like he was trying to fit into his mother’s shoes! After relaxing, we donned our yukata and slippers and went down to the dining room for dinner. Junko was very funny when she was explaining how to put the yukata on. You must put the right side over first and then cover with the left before tying with the belt. If you do it the other way, everyone will think you are a ghost as that is how the Japanese lay out the dead. The dinner was again a sort of Japanese tapas, but the table settings were fantastic. It was truly a work of art. Junko had written out the seating cards with our names in English as well as in Japanese characters. She also made us each a small piece of origami – cranes for the ladies and Samurai helmets for the men. We had some familiar things at dinner, but there were some new items as well: a small pot of seafood gratin (shrimp, squid and clam) wrapped in a gift bag, sushi served on a bamboo leaf (see photo), minestrone soup, locally made tofu with mushrooms and crabmeat in a pot which was heated over a small brazier, tempura, soba (buckwheat noodles, and fresh fruit. After stuffing ourselves, Junko showed us how to put on a kimono. This is a very intensive and involved process. We all thought she did a wonderful job, but she said that if a lady is going to attend a formal occasion, she would go to the salon to have someone help her get dressed. When we got back to the room, we discovered that the young girls had moved the tea table to the side and set up our futon beds covered with thick comforters on top of the tatami mats. Kelly and I went down to the communal bath (separated by sex, of course) – no bathing suits allowed! The water is quite hot – over 100 degrees and it was quite lovely to sit and soak. Three other women from the tour joined us. When we were thoroughly heated, we went up to our rooms for the night.
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